Why "guilty" or "not guilty" but not "guilty" or "innocent"?

Question

Why do some courts (like those in America) decide through the dictum "guilty"(g) or "not guilty"(~g) instead of using the term "innocent"(i) for "not guilty"(~g)?

I think the polar opposites g/~g seem more suitable, because:

1. Answers directly the prosecutor's question and faces it correctly as a completely ignorant question;
2. It avoids any involvement with the problem of giving a truth value to the identity "~g=i";
3. It takes into account that a trial's decision is a pro vero statement, and that court does not claim itself as a ruler of truth.

Answer 1

It is a matter of convention. In many legal systems, the threshold of proof for a guilty verdict is set very high, so if the prosecution fails to attain it then the jury must delivery a not-guilty verdict even if, say, they think it is more likely than not that the defendant was guilty. Not guilty can therefore mean 'possibly guilty- we can't tell for sure', which is not the same as innocent. Someone can be not-guilty and innocent, but the two terms are not synonymous.

Answer 2

Because the defence does not need to demonstrate innocence; whilst the prosecution must demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Answer 3

One of the difficulties with the logic here is the definitions of "guilty" and "innocent" you're using. There's actually a number of different concepts entailed within those terms, and it's rather easy to equivocate and mix things up.

The two main underlying concepts within "guilty" & "innocent" are A) did the accused in fact commit the crime and B) was the accused found culpable of the crime by the legal system. The difficulty is that while "is found legally culpable" is easy to check, " did in fact do it" is in general hard if not impossible for a third party to verify. As such, the two are often conflated, with culpability being a proxy for "did in fact do it". However, all four combinations are possible in practice.

The quadrant of "culpable & did it" is normally what one thinks of when thinking of "guilty". Also, most everyone would agree that "not culpable & didn't do it" would count as "innocent".

Where to put the two "mixed" combinations is why it's difficult to take "innocent" as a direct equivalent to "not guilty". A third party can't know for certain whether someone did in fact commit the crime, so all they have is the culpability. So it's potentially expeditious to equate "guilty" and "innocent" to "culpable" and "not culpable", respectively.

However, the conventional meaning of "innocent" is usually taken to mean more "didn't do it". So it feels like a misnomer to lump the "not culpable but did actually commit the crime" subset into the "innocent" category. As such, making "not culpable" equate to "not guilty" instead is more descriptive.

But wait, what about "didn't do it, but found culpable anyway" subset? In post-enlightenment (Western) legal systems, this is considered to be a severe miscarriage of justice, and an attempt is made to strenuously avoid it. As such, it's normally assumed that this combination rarely happens. (It's also assumed that if anyone was proven to be in this subset, their culpability status would be rapidly reassessed.) Given the difficulty of assessing commission-in-fact, if the accused is found legally culpable of the crime, it's taken that they almost certainly did in fact commit the crime. So for the small number of people who do fall into this category, you end up in a strange situation where the legal system considers them "guilty" (i.e. in the "culpable & did it" quadrant), but their advocates consider them "innocent" (in the "did not in fact commit the crime" sense, regardless of their culpability status). It's less a dispute about what to call this quadrant, and more a disagreement about whether it actually applies to any particular person.

Answer 4

In the American judicial system, defendants are assumed to be innocent, and the prosecution must prove that they are guilty. There are philosophical rationales for that, of course, e.g.:

• Logically speaking, it's difficult to prove a negative: in this case, to prove that one did not do a specific crime
• Defendants rarely have the resources or skillset needed to investigate the crime they've been accused of and exonerate themselves
• The law would risk de-evolving into a tool of harassment and vengeance, where people could be accused of crimes simply to force them through the time, expense, and exposure of showing themselves innocent

So when a judge or jury returns a verdict, the actual question they are answering is: "Has the defendant been proven guilty beyond a reasonable dounbt? ". The answers they can give are:

• Proven guilty
• Not proven guilty

which is shortened to:

• Guilty
• Not guilty

In essence, the verdict says nothing whatsoever about the defendant, who may or may not have committed the crime regardless of the verdict. The verdict is a judgement on the prosecution's case: on whether the prosecution effectively proved its case before the court.

Answer 5

The defendant is accused of committing a crime. The defendant can be innocent and yet held guilty in court. The defendant can be held not guilty and yet be not innocent.

Answer 6

The legal system here is somewhat similar to the reasoning behind a hypothesis test in statistics.

We have a null hypothesis (the defendant is innocent). We then set an decision threshold. In the case of statistics, this is often p<0.05, in law its "beyond reasonable doubt". We then test the hypothesis against the evidence and the threshold. If the evidence meets the threshold we reject the null hypothesis. If the evidence isn't sufficient, we don't reject the hypothesis. But not rejecting the hypothesis doesn't mean it is true.

If p=0.06, its still the case that its is very unlikely that the we would see this evidence in a world where the null hypothesis was true, but it doesn't quite make our threshold. Similarly, the evidence could suggest a defendant was probably guilty. But probably guilty isn't enough, it has be beyond reasonable doubt, so we can't find the defendant guilty. However, it would be perverse to say that a defendant was innocent, if the evidence added up to them "probably" being guilty.

Answer 7

In short: "innocent" is a claim you need to prove just like "guilty".

the 'non guilty' verdict means as much as "the evidence is inconclusive" or "we can't prove he defendant is guilty"

to be judged 'innocent', a lot more work is needed. this sometimes happens, and innocent always means "not guilty", but the inverse isn't true by definition.

if it very much possible for someone to be judged 'not guilty', but when new evidence comes up, there is now enough to claim the defendant 'guilty' at a second pass.